Photo sessions are always a treat for me as an artist because they lead to paintings.  If they don’t support a concept that I’m already working on, they give me ideas for new ones. The best shoots are the ones where I’ve prepared a choreography in advance. That’s the word I use to describe the event flow in the session. Without it, opportunities are lost. It would be like hiring actors and filming them without a script. So it’s a script.

The thing I always want to accomplish is to get the mind of the model off the fact that she’s modeling. She’s got to be engaged in something that either intrigues or distracts her so that her glorious face and form that is perfect for the story I will paint can be authentic. Even the best painters have examples of the dreaded “I’m posing” look in their portfolio, but I do everything in my power to avoid it. 

So I design the flow of segments of a photo shoot so that each one will engage her in an activity calculated to get the look and posture needed. I try to keep it light and fun. A serious photography session should be serious like a serious musical performance: totally enjoyable in spite of it’s precision.

It’s been a mixed bag. My photos are useless for any  other purpose. They would win no awards in any photographic metric of excellence. But for my paintings, they work just fine. Sometimes the model shows up in a bad mood. Sometimes the equipment or location fails. Alas. It’s like crop failure, you get another field planted as soon as possible.

When I paint, I’m using form and light to describe the angel that I see so that anyone else can see. I painted an example of that (it’s unfinished but far enough along to make this point) in the painting below. Instead of doing a “just following her travail” nativity painting I chose to represent the morning that the family prepared to leave town. Mary and the baby wait while Joseph gasses up the car and adjusts the seating.  The woman passing the mouth of the cave glances in with absolutely no clue what she’s witnessing.

The photos will never completely tell that story. They are actually akin symbolically to the car a racer drives to victory or the implements a surgeon uses to save lives.